The value of land is rapidly increasing, and estates which, ten years ago, could have been bought for 2s. 8d. an acre are now fetching 20s. an acre, though grants may still be obtained from the Government land office.
In the Kikuyu country itself vast changes have, of course, taken place in the ten years which have elapsed since I was supreme there. Four or five Government stations have been established, roads have been opened up in various directions, while many white settlers have come in, and are doing well, in addition to the swarm of missionaries of various sects who have settled all over the country; in fact, I gave my own house to one of the first, I think I may say the first—a Roman Catholic priest—who came into the country. The people themselves have settled down quietly under the new conditions, and pay the hut-tax regularly, which is a by no means inconsiderable item in the annual revenue of the colony. The Kikuyu are excellent workers, and are now to be met with in every part of the dependency, and in almost every trade, while the chiefs have taken to building stone houses in place of their native huts, and riding mules. In my opinion the Kikuyu will ultimately become the most important among the native races of this part of the continent, owing to their greater intelligence, industry, and adaptability.
Of course, at the present day, my name is little more than a legend among the Kikuyu, around which many wonderful stories have been built up by the people. In the nine years which have elapsed since I left the country many of the older men who knew me have died, while the rising generation, who, as children, only knew of me as the most powerful influence in the province, have only vague memories of actual happenings, which they have gradually embroidered until I should have great difficulty in recognizing some of the occurrences myself in their present form.
A book of this sort will probably be looked upon as incomplete without some expression of opinion as to the value of missions and the missionary influence. It must not be inferred from the various remarks scattered through the book that I am one of that fairly numerous body who, with considerable experience to back their opinion, profess to regard the missionary as the worst curse that can fall on a newly-opened country, but I do say that the whole system on which these missions are conducted requires to be thoroughly revised. The primary mistake, from which most of the trouble springs, is the assumption, to which all missionaries seem to be officially compelled to subscribe, that the African negro is, or can be made by education, the moral and intellectual equal of the white man, and that by teaching him to read and write and say the Lord’s Prayer by rote the inherent characteristics resulting from centuries of savagery can be utterly nullified in the course of a year or two. The deliberate and considered opinion of those best qualified to know, the men who have to live among these people, not for a year or two, but for a lifetime, brought into constant and more really intimate contact with them than the great majority of missionaries, is, that education in the narrow meaning of the term is a very doubtful blessing to the average negro compared with the enormous benefits to be conferred by a sound course of industrial training. As an instance in point, let us take the case of Uganda, where the missionary has had a free hand, such as he has probably had in no other part of the world, for the last twenty years. Yet, after all this time, there is hardly a single Uganda artisan to be found—and those of poor quality—in Uganda itself; British East Africa has to look to the native of India to find the skilled artisans required for the service of the community. And it must be borne in mind that the Waganda are undoubtedly the most intelligent of all the native races of East Africa, so that the settler may fairly consider himself justified when he charges the missionaries with neglecting, practically entirely, one of the greatest aids to the civilization of the native that he could possibly use. The native, properly trained to handicrafts, and able to understand the advantage of skill in his particular line, would be much more likely, as his means increased, to see the advantages of civilization, and to appreciate the benefits of that education which, as often as not, now lands him in jail; while the civilized negro, become a really useful member of the community, would also be much more likely to prove a satisfactory convert to Christianity than the material at present paraded as such, of whom the average white man with experience of Africa will tell you that he would not have a “mission native” as a servant at any price.